Getting a NAS to pull files.

swain90 · 19 Jun 2017 at 11:21

Hi All,

I'm after a bit of information of what sort of functions you can expect from a NAS operating system. This is aimed more at COTS products, I'm not really wanting to image the NAS with any sort of Linux distro.

We currently have £2k max to spend.
Needs to be 1U as it'll be fitted into a cubical.

The scenario I have is that two servers need to access the same NAS. However these servers can't communicate with each other. We were looking to link the two servers to a NAS which has at least two different network cards and assign each card with a different subnet.

Server 1 needs to transfer logs to the NAS. Ideally I would like the NAS to pull these files from the server. Is this sort of feature easily achievable? Due to the way the system is set up, we can't map a network drive to the server so it saves the logs automatically to the NAS.

Sever 2 isn't to much of a problem, as we can map a drive to the NAS so that it can see the list of logs.

Cheers

Swain90

Nikumba · 19 Jun 2017 at 11:34

You could run a syslog server on the NAS and get Server1 to output logs to that?

swain90 · 19 Jun 2017 at 11:37

The logs which server 1 creates are for a bespoke application. Server 2 can then be used to read those logs for further analysis so I can't use a syslog server.

Nikumba · 19 Jun 2017 at 12:41

Depending what OS are in use, could so something like robocopy/rsync from the NAS to server1.

However I am curious why server1 and 2 can not communicate, if it is something like they are on different physical networks rather than VLANs, I would be concerned as the NAS would be bridging the two networks potentially creating a security loop hole in the networks.

swain90 · 19 Jun 2017 at 12:52

Server 1 and Sever 2 are identical in terms of Computer Name and IP addresses. Basically Server 2 is an "offline" version off Sever 1 (server 1 is in the live environment). In order for server 2 to analyse the logs of server 1, they have to be identical.

Both servers are running Windows Server 2003 (yes I know it's old, but that's what we've got). What NAS would run robocopy?

Little_Crow · 19 Jun 2017 at 14:17

To take it back to the root issue you have, have you tried using the UNC path of the NAS (\\Servername\Share) to transfer the logs?
Or is the bespoke system only capable of using a local drive?

Drive letters should be avoided in automated things like this, they rely on a user being logged in and having a drive mapping that won't be there.

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Also, if you aren't aware MS released a whole bunch of patches for 2K3 in response to the Wannacry malware and a further batch in the June round of updates for other critical security issues - I'd highly recommend hunting these down if you haven't already.

swain90 · 19 Jun 2017 at 15:35

The software is designed to use physical disks so unable to use UNC paths.

I'm currently looking at XPEnology playing around with the OS to see if I can rsync working, is it worth pursuing this, or will I be reaching a dead end?